British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent served in a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
